"Disappointing attempt at reviving a dying genre"

Rating: 6/10 (22 September 2005)

A powerful virus escapes from a British research facility. Transmitted in a drop of blood, the virus infects those and turns them into a zombie like creature. Within 28 days the country is overwhelmed and a handful of survivors begin their attempts to salvage a future, little realizing that the deadly virus is not the only thing that threatens them.
Here is a little film that could have been a jump start in the horror genre, but with it's 2nd act, it falls apart as it tries to be something more then it actually is. It sells itself as an end of the world, fight for our lives film, and does that successfully for the most part, but when it takes a turn into a more humane state, it fizzles out and loses any interest it once had.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the field scene, that was tremendous, the cinematography was really great. The deserted London was probably one things in this movie, that make it watchable. I liked how they weren't you "typical" slow moving "grrr" zombies, but blood-coughing, running marathon zombies. IF you would call them zombies, or just people infected with "RAGE" The military characters are the worse, with the British soldiers being nothing more than your typical foul-mouthed grunts. The clever use of dialogue in "Dog Soldiers" was fast and hip, but still built characters, here it most definitely does not.
What does set this apart from your other zombie type movies is of course is isolated in London feel to it. The main character wakes up naked, sort of reborn, and finds himself in a new world where people are infected with a virus called rage, that turns them into a zombie like creature. It;s nice to see what people would do in this situation, and we get varies degrees of that.
Our heros were in more trouble with other humans then they were with the creatures. By the time we got to the climax you were cheering on the Zombies. I thought the love story felt forced because "every" movie needs a love story and I found nothing at all to be thought provoking because it had all been done before. One thing I found odd was the lack of security when the "activists" liberate the chimps.
Since I had such high hopes for this film and was totally astonished at how terrible the last 20 or so minutes of the film was, a horrible ending did the movie in for me, it became the most disappointing movie of the summer.